Nuance's Multilingual Speech Deployments Translate to Business Success -- in Any Language

MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 12, 2003--

Telecom and Financial Services Giants Among Companies Utilizing Nuance

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Speech Solutions to Support Multilingual Customer Bases

Industry leaders worldwide -- from airline giants to banking institutions -- are relying on Nuance (Nasdaq:NUAN), the speech experts, and its multilingual speech solutions to connect their customers with the information they need, anytime, anywhere -- in any language. Nuance's market leading multilingual and natural language speech capabilities keep innovative companies ahead of the curve, enabling them to deliver new services to broader groups of customers.

Forward-thinking companies are realizing that we live in a multilingual world with a growing, ever-changing global economy. Current estimates place the number of languages spoken worldwide at 6,809. The companies that lead and succeed in multilingual markets are those that eliminate potential language barriers to deliver new services and communicate with a wide range of customers in the languages and dialects prevalent in their specific regions or communities.

"In a global economy, bridging the language gap is a business imperative. Nuance is arming companies with a real strategic advantage, providing speech solutions that deliver information and services in the languages that best serve their customer base," said Chuck Berger, president and CEO, Nuance. "We offer unique multilingual speech technologies that automatically detect the language a caller is speaking, automatically tune and adjust for regional accents and deliver high accuracy rates even when callers toggle between two languages. For a company serving multilingual markets, that technology advantage translates into total customer satisfaction with bottom line benefits."

Global Leaders Deploy Multilingual Speech Applications

SAS and UBS are both prime examples of how multilingual Nuance speech applications are connecting customers with the information they need, in real-time. SAS Denmark, offering worldwide air transportation, is using a Nuance-powered speech system that allows callers to interact with an automated attendant in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish in order to obtain flight information and book tickets. European financial services giant UBS leverages a multilingual Nuance speech application to connect millions of callers with balance sheet and fund transfer information -- in Swiss-High German, French, Italian, and English.

"The community we serve -- four million customers in Switzerland who speak four languages -- meant UBS needed a speech system to not only understand the language a caller is speaking, but also comprehend their particular accent -- and that's where Nuance came in," said Dr. Joerg Bruckner, Associate Director, UBS. "The speech system is the primary interaction we have with many customers, so we needed a multilingual solution that quickly determines what the caller is saying -- in his or her native language -- and then connects him/her with needed information. Basically, it makes business sense to give customers the information they need -- in the language they speak. That's the bottom line."

Multilingual speech applications are making inroads in other key industries. Telecommunications leader Bell Canada is implementing Nuance speech systems to meet the language needs of its customer base. Bell Canada first chose Nuance to voice-enable its 310-BELL customer service line last year with a speech-based call steering application and accompanying English-speaking persona, "Emily." The English roll-out proved so successful -- with $3.2 million saved in misdirected calls -- that Bell continued the momentum with the deployment of "Emilie," a bilingual version who greets Quebec customers in French (and comprehends a variety of accents) as well as English.

Unique Nuance Technologies Ensure Multilingual Satisfaction

The successes achieved by SAS, UBS, Bell Canada and many others are supported by unique Nuance product advantages that deliver optimal multilingual speech recognition performance. The company's industry-leading Say Anything(TM) natural language technology allows callers to speak naturally, free of touch-tone mazes, while the system "listens" for key concepts in the spoken request to determine a caller's needs. Innovative Dynamic Language Detection(TM) detects the particular language a caller is speaking in real-time and continues with prompts and responses in the appropriate language. This feature is especially useful in cross-cultural regions where callers mix languages within a given conversation or speak in a heavy accent. Meanwhile, auto-tuning allows the speech system to be tuned to reflect characteristics of a specific enterprise's caller population. Auto-tuning can be used by a carrier with customers in the southern United States, for example, to adapt its voice-driven customer care system to recognize the region's distinct accent. Also, auto-tuning enables speech systems to "listen" for and detect common phrases callers most often use when interacting with the system, allowing for expedited customer service.

Nuance's award-winning speech recognition engine and Say Anything technology currently supports 27 languages, including Arabic (Jordan), Cantonese (Hong Kong-China), Chinese, Mandarin (China, Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia-New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, US-Canada, Ireland-UK), French (France and Canada), German (Austria-Germany and Switzerland), Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish (European, North-Latin America), Swedish and Turkish.

About Nuance

Nuance is the speech expert. Nuance's speech software solutions enable automated access to everything from account balances to flight information, email reading to voice activated dialing -- accessed using nothing more than the power of voice and an ordinary phone. In markets around the world, leading enterprises and telecommunications carriers -- including British Airways, Nomura Securities, OnStar, Sprint PCS, United Parcel Service, Vodafone, and many more -- work with Nuance to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction and retention, create new sources of revenue and improve security. Nuance is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif. and has offices around the world. For more information, visit http://www.nuance.com or call 1-888-NUANCE-8.

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including, for example, those relating to the benefits attainable by using Nuance speech products and future customer deployments and adoption of Nuance speech products. There is no assurance that the results contemplated by any forward-looking statements will be realized. The following factors, risks and uncertainties, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described or implied in this press release's forward-looking statements: the risk that new applications will not be deployed as anticipated or will not achieve anticipated benefits, cost savings and/or customer adoption in some or all circumstances and other factors described in Nuance's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to Nuance's last-filed report form 10-Q. Nuance does not undertake to update any oral or written forward-looking statements that may be made by or on behalf of Nuance.

Nuance, Dynamic Language Detection and Say Anything are trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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